Just okay

Aug 31, 2010

by drebbles

Rating:

+3

You are a world famous P.I. who has been hired by Grandma Rose to find the $488 million dollar lottery ticket she lost. You must search for hidden objects in various locations, find keys, and solve puzzles while looking for the ticket. Find the ticket and Grandma Rose will pay you $20 million dollars. There's only one catch – you only have twelve hours to find the ticket.

"Mystery PI: The Lottery Ticket" has you looking for over 2,100 hidden objects in 20 locations (such as a Body Shop, bathroom, dive site, café, Antique Store, factory, library, park, and more). In addition to the list of hidden objects (ten in each location), you must search for 20 keys in various locations to unlock the Unlimited Seek and Find Game. There are 20 levels to the game and each level has you looking for hidden objects in several different locations (the number of locations increases as the game goes on). The game is timed – the higher the level the more time you have – and there is no untimed feature during the regular game, however the Unlimited Seek and Find Game is untimed. There are unlimited hints, although you do have to wait for the hint bar to refill after using it.

"Mystery PI: The Lottery Ticket" is an okay hidden object game that reminds me a lot of early Mystery Case File games (like Huntsville and Prime Suspects). While the premise of the game is you are looking for a missing lottery ticket, there is no real storyline – you simply look for hidden objects. While some are cleverly hidden and some locations are downright tricky, looking for the hidden objects becomes tedious very quickly. While the game is timed, the time is ample enough and I never came close to running out of time. After finding all (or most – you don't have to find all the hidden objects to complete a level) the hidden objects in a level you have to solve a puzzle to move on. This too became tedious as the puzzles all seem the same (click on square to match related items; click on squares to match same color items; click on squares to match same type of item). While having to look for keys to unlock the Unlimited Seek and Find Game adds a nice bit of challenge, I found the game itself to be disappointing and more of the same old thing. The game does have some clever touches (the company that created it is called SpinTop and there is a Spin Top hidden in each location) but not enough to redeem it.